Abstract

The notion of Cyber-Physical-Social system (CPSS) is an emerging concept developed as a result of the need to understand the impact of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) on humans and vice versa. The concept of CPSS has been around for over a decade now, and it has gained increasing attention over the past few years. Nevertheless, its conceptualisation has always been use-case dependent and there is no generic view as most works focus on specific domains of application. Despite the notion that CPSS is still in its infancy, the evolution to incorporate human aspects in the CPS research has unlocked many research challenges. CPSS environments are often regarded as physical and virtual places of interaction that humans and sensor-enabled smart devices cohabitate. Thus, the social aspect is tightly coined with the presence of a human in the vicinity of the so-called smart devices either serving as a source of information or consuming a service. The prominent aim of this paradigm shift is to ultimately ensure a seamless human-machine interaction experience. Hence, the newly introduced social part largely resides in how machines perceive and respond to humans’ interaction responses. This constitutes complex emotional, cognitive and behavioural facets. However, none of the existing works provides a comprehensive representation of such aspects.

It is also evident that the evolution towards a more and more pervasiveness of technology is gradually increasing the complexity of CPSS environments. Especially since the rationale behind the CPSS paradigm is to bring humans to the centre of the interaction experience, system designs should carefully address various aspects of social dynamics. Nevertheless, ensuring a seamless experience in such a context is not a trivial task. Particularly because it is often a subjective experience that is largely influenced by individual preferences, interests, needs and capabilities varying from one person to another. This plays a crucial role in determining users’ quality of experience. Additionally, the actions and behaviours of people within a CPSS are also reflections of their unique personalities shaped over time through personal experiences, knowledge, and different environmental factors that are not yet fully understood. Therefore, recognising personal preferences, interests, limitations and opportunities of individuals become one of the necessities to ensure a seamless interaction within a CPSS. This positions the notion of personalisation at the heart of the CPSS paradigm. In this context the objective of the thesis is primarily to provide a theoretical contribution in formalising the concept of CPSS, thereby establishing a domain-independent understanding of the paradigm. Subsequently, to propose a novel personalisation approach in the context of CPSS by taking into account the overall systemic complexities which is not the case of current approaches. Finally, to demonstrate the proposed approach by designing personalisation algorithms for selected case studies and experimentally validate the feasibility.

Below you can find a summarized introduction for each of the thesis chapters.

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